When the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments' inventory
of the city of Cambridge was published in 1959 in two substantial volumes with
a separate container of plans,1 they were priced at the princely sum of five guineas (£5.25). They were out of print by the time that I
paid £52.00 for my copy about 25 years later.
I was conscious at the time that this was virtually ten times the
original selling price but I reasoned to myself that they would never be
cheaper. So I greet the appearance of
the Cambridge inventory in British History Online with mixed feelings - freely
accessible online publication, to the high standards associated with British
History Online, is a great boon to scholarship but may reduce demand for the printed
volumes and therefore may have devalued my copy!

Naturally, College and University buildings fill most of the
Cambridge inventory. However, it also
covers the growth of the town.
Furthermore, from 1946 the Commissioners were empowered not only to make
an inventory of 'Ancient and Historical Monuments and Constructions' predating
the eighteenth century, as had been done before World War II, but also to
describe 'such further Monuments and Constructions subsequent to' 1714 'as may
seem in your discretion to be worthy of mention'.2 In the Cambridge inventory, as in the preceding
one covering Dorset, this resulted in the adoption of an 1850 cut-off date3
and, for buildings that could be identified as being earlier than 1850, little
or no selection seems to have been applied in practice. Furthermore, as the preface observed, 'the
first half of the 19th century' was 'a period of notable urban development in
Cambridge'.4 The result was that the volumes cover not
only internationally known monuments such as King's College Chapel, but also
include some quite modest terraced houses - so modest, indeed, as to include
the house in which I lived from 1991 to 2005, which had been built (it was
suggested) for the "outside staff" of the larger houses in the same
development.5

Such houses were sometimes recorded with
almost as much care as the major monuments - the development of which my house
formed a part is illustrated by a layout diagram and by internal plans of representative
houses, the latter presented alongside plans of similar houses to facilitate
comparison. Even so, there were times
when the surveyors were virtually unable to find anything to say: after they
had diplomatically described early nineteenth-century houses in Brunswick
Walk as 'pleasant in their simplicity and lack of ostentation', they were
reduced to reporting that 'Willow Place and Causeway Passage ... are even less
distinguished than the foregoing'.6 Nonetheless, the recording and comparison of small
terraced houses that were then little more than one hundred years old would
have been ground-breaking at the time.

In some cases the survey recorded buildings that were soon
to be demolished. Indeed, Willow Place
and Causeway Passage have largely vanished.
That small late-Georgian terraced houses should fall victim to 1960s and
1970s improvements is not surprising (they had been assessed
in 1950 as "fourth class" and although, if they had lasted a few
years longer, they might well have been refurbished and extended as desirable pieds
à
terre, it has to be said that our favourable view of Georgian domestic
architecture rests in part on the destruction of its meanest specimens). Perhaps more surprising in a town that trades
on its "heritage" is the loss of the 'good brick front of 1727'
belonging to the Central
Hotel on Peas Hill, where Pepys was supposed to have 'drank pretty hard' in
1660, and one of the secular buildings deemed by the Commissioners to be
'especially worthy of preservation',7 but replaced in 1960-2 by a hostel
for King's College.

As Professor Chris Dyer observed in his post
in this blog on the Northamptonshire volumes, the Royal Commission's
post-war inventory volumes 'marked a high point' in its
work that was not sustained. Since
1984 the Commission and English Heritage (into which the Commission was
incorporated in 1999) have continued to record and to analyze, but have
published the results in thematic volumes, rather than in parish by parish (or
town by town) inventories. Theforeword to the last inventory volume, published in 1984, admitted
that 'the creation of an adequately researched and assessed inventory of
England's archaeological and architectural heritage is now accepted ... as a
complex and infinite task' (my
emphasis). Indeed, what seems 'adequately
researched and assessed' to one generation may disappoint the next one. Now that Causeway Passage has vanished from
the map we might well wish that the inventory had gone into a bit more
detail. And, just as 1714 came to seem,
after World War II, too remote an end date for the survey, resulting in an
expansion of the Commissioners' remit, the 1850 cut off chosen for the
Cambridge volumes will seem too remote to those who want to study Cambridge's
later nineteenth-century growth. In
practice, though, we must be grateful for what was achieved, and (notwithstanding
the potential decline in the value of my printed copy) the online publication
of the inventories is very much to be welcomed.

1 All footnote references are to the city of Cambridge
inventory. The volumes were continuously
paginated and are treated as a single entity by British History Online.